National Coming Out Day…

My National Coming Out Day post comes two days late, but no less heartfelt. Telling our stories and retelling them as they evolve has great power. I am truly grateful for all of those who have shared their stories and those who have not or cannot.

At seventeen, I was a mess. I had been viciously, methodically, systematically bullied for years since moving to the Half Moon Bay Coastside. Although I had a family who loved me, I had no queer people in my life, no one to talk to about this thing I really didn’t want to be. Gay people were bullied, hated upon, not accepted, and I already felt all of those things, so why would I make it worse for myself by being open about it?

But seventeen brought me a freedom of something endlessly important for a cooped-up teenager in a small town: my driver’s license. With the freedom of a car and a license, I was able to drive north to San Francisco, which has always, at least spiritually, been my home. There were certainly gay men in San Francisco, but also nightclubs, warehouse parties, alcohol, and drugs. The new simplicity of access to the City accelerated my coming out process. There was just too much to see and do to keep it to myself.

The first person I had to come out to was myself. I had been told that being gay was bad by so many people in so many ways. Accepting this fact about myself was hard, but ultimately worth it. At the homecoming dance my senior year of high school, I was particularly sad and frustrated with my inability to get anyone to dance with me. I had realized some time before this that my classmates expected me to want to dance with women but that I did not want to dance with women. I wanted to dance with a man, one who loved me and cared about me. I found my friend Amanda, and sobbing to her, not sure why in the moment, I told her that I thought I was gay and I don’t know what to do about it but I needed to tell someone. And so it was.

A few months later, having just begun to adjust to my new identity, I decided I couldn’t hide it from my parents anymore. Everything the media had told me led me to believe that my parents were going to reject me, throw me out of the house, and not love me anymore. So I did the only thing I could think to do at the time: prepare myself for that inevitability.

It was unnecessary, of course. When I came out as gay to my parents, they were accepting and had known for many years. It wasn’t all peaches and cream, but we talked, we shared, and we remained close.

I came out as non-binary only last year, at thirty-two. Along with that new identity I changed my identity as “gay” to “queer.” Gay, to me, means male-identifying being attracted to male-identifying. As I’m no longer male-identifying, gay didn’t make sense anymore. Queer is a catch-all and is much closer to the way I feel. Interestingly, along with this identity change, I also began experiencing attraction to people with a wider variety of gender identity presentation.

Being non-binary means that I reject a binary identity, namely male or female, man or woman. More broadly, I reject that binary as a concept, too. After my stint as a drag queen, I knew that I did not identify as a woman. In 2020, I came to identify this way as I processed in therapy numerous traumatic events from my lifetime. Those events are not the focus of this post, but I will share them at a later date. But those traumas I’ve uncovered are inextricably linked to my non-binary identity.

I saw coming out as non-binary as freeing myself of the shackles of identifying as male, which had caused me lots of grief in the past. Men had been the source of my bullying, of my sexual trauma, of ridicule and abuse and criticism. I didn’t want to be that anymore. Suddenly, I realized that I had the ability to free myself from my identity as a man. And so, I did. It has improved my quality of life significantly and in many unexpected ways.

For me, my gender and sexual orientation identities are relatively small in their influence over my day-to-day life. But I share them, loud and proud, as the possibility of helping even one person overcome their fears is well worth it.

My personal journey has led to a deeper understanding of the ways gender and sexual orientation identities affect people’s lives. That is the primary reason why I always offer name and gender-marker change assistance pro bono: cost should never be a barrier to one’s identity. If you’ve been wanting to change your name and/or gender marker, please check out my page on getting that done!